Peiran Wang (*1999) grew up in Changchun, where water often appeared as snow and ice during long winters. Since then, her life has unfolded across different geographies, climates, and languages, from Northeast China to Taiwan and later Switzerland. Water has accompanied these journeys in changing forms: frozen and flowing, scarce and abundant, intimate and planetary. Moving between landscapes has shaped her understanding of water not only as a material presence, but also as a way of thinking about migration, transformation, and belonging. The long winters of her childhood and the alpine environments she later encountered continue to inform her artistic imagination.
Through writing, installation, and moving image, her practice explores the kinship between water and women, and their capacity to reshape both private and collective imaginaries through speculative narratives. In her work, water becomes a medium through which different temporalities coexist: memories, myths, futures, and inherited histories circulate together rather than unfold linearly. Its fluidity offers possibilities for slowing down, revisiting the past, and imagining alternative forms of relation.
She received her MFA with Distinction in Fine Arts from the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste and previously studied translation and foreign literature in China and Taiwan, experiences that continue to shape her interdisciplinary and multilingual approach to artistic research. Drawing on her professional experience in the art industry and her reflections on artistic ecosystems, her practice has evolved to take flexible forms—both individual and collaborative—in pursuit of long-term modes of coexistence and collective learning. Her work have been presented internationally through exhibitions, screenings, residencies, and publications across Switzerland, Norway, Germany, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States. She has also worked in contemporary art research, independent publishing, curatorial writing, and artistic translation, contributing to projects including documenta fifteen.